Grant: Training Grant: Healthy Cities Research Training Platform - LOI

Canadian cities and their residents face significant challenges due to climate change and the rising frequency and severity of disasters that couple with the aging infrastructures and technological disruption. The socio-economic and environmental resilience of Canadian cities requires enabling conditions where healthy individuals and communities can thrive, and where institutions, organizations and infrastructures can adapt swiftly and appropriately to the new and emerging conditions through timely and embedded adaptation, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery strategies that are science and evidence-based. Such conditions are not automatic but rely on political decisions, democratic process and community involvement at all stages of design and implementation. Today's challenges require a new generation of highly qualified personnel (HQP) equipped with skills and training to be able to facilitate and conduct collaboration across sectors, services and professional or disciplinary silos, as well as an enhanced ability to work directly with urban residents, decision-makers, and other stakeholders. We will develop a Healthy Cities Training Initiative, whose Network and Platform will interact synergistically to produce a new generation of leadership and innovations to enable the conditions for resilient, healthy Canadian cities. We will create a Network of academics and their collaborating stakeholders across municipal, provincial and federal levels to mentor and develop trainees for development of an effective, data driven, intelligent health and resilience monitoring, assessment, and management Platform. The Platform will draw on causal mapping, state-of -the-art artificial intelligence and big data technologies to create targeted analytics and goal oriented Data Dashboards, and for complexity agent-based simulation and Scenario Planning. Such innovations will then be applied to the social, environmental and health challenges faced by Canadian cities.